The Hole in the Wall (16 page)

Read The Hole in the Wall Online

Authors: Lisa Rowe Fraustino

Tags: #Technology & Engineering, #Mining, #Family, #Action & Adventure, #Environmental Science, #Mines and mineral resources, #Juvenile Fiction, #Family life, #Mysteries & Detective Stories, #General, #Supernatural, #Science, #Twins, #Fiction, #Soil pollution, #Brothers and sisters

BOOK: The Hole in the Wall
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“Sweet,” I said, jumping down from the bunk. “I’m going too. Ow!” Upon landing a sharp pain ran up through my backbone.
“Next time use the ladder,” Ma said, handing Grum the bullets.
“I’m not staying here alone,” Barbie said. The two of us helped Grum into her shoes, then held her loose-skinned arms as she picked her way down the stairs. Usually Grum only did the stairs once in the morning and once at night because they were hard on her knees.
She stopped in front of the mirror to pluck her new perm into place.
I yanked the door open. It had been raining again, probably pouring, as I immediately felt when I stepped onto the so-called lawn. Luckily I was barefoot or what was left of my sneakers would have dissolved. An inch of water had pooled all around. And here’s the really strange part: that green stuff which passed for grass had turned all hard and pokey like a welcome mat made of Velcro. Don’t things usually get soft when they’re soaked in water? Anyway, I didn’t have a good feeling about Grum walking in this. The rutty lane was dangerous enough in the daylight when the ground was dry.
“Grum, it’s really nasty out here. You should go back in. I can take the gun. Pa taught me to shoot.” It wasn’t a lie, exactly. He had let me aim the gun at a beer can once when he was target practicing.
My grandmother hesitated, clinging to the railing, and craned her neck out toward the cuckoo ruckus. The porch light made a moony glow around her white asbestos curls, and without her teeth in, her cheeks looked like sinkholes in the strip mine. She could have been some photographer’s masterpiece.
“I’ll pray for Jesus to guide me,” I offered. If anything would convince her to turn back, that would. But no, she was too worried to leave it to me to leave it to Jesus.
“You two each take an elbow and help her,” Ma said. “I’ll light your way—I’ve got the flashlight. Oh, my, we need to get some new batteries. That trip to the commune must have used these up.”
“Yeah, it must have,” I said.
And so we headed out slowly, taking careful steps. There weren’t any lights on in Jed’s castle. The farther we got away from the house, the darker the ground seemed. The dying flashlight cast a weak yellow arc on the puddles and rivulets we steered around.
“Ow!” My bare toe knocked something. It didn’t hurt, though, just startled me.
Ma snapped the flashlight that way, and it spotlighted the cat dish, tipped on its side and spilling milk. “Who’s still wasting our good milk on the cat!”
“Who might that be?” said Grum, pointing the gun at two foot-long shadows. Shoes, to be specific. Ma turned the thin beam on them to reveal a man’s body sprawled toes-up between the henhouse and Jed’s castle.
Ma swore at Pa. They were his shoes.
She traced the light along the rest of him. Yep, his best pants, his dress shirt, and his face, too. What we could see of it. Because on top of his chest sat Stupid, purring like Pa was his best friend. I was amazed. Pa the cat-hater had been taking care of Fluffy Kitty!
“That’s my boy,” Grum said in mock pride. She clucked and gave Pa a poke with the gun. “Wake up, Sleeping Beauty.” The cat meowed and ran toward the henhouse.
I would have checked to see if Pa was still breathing, but he started snoring when Grum poked him. He was passed out drunk, or so I figured from the sour beer smell. Luckily he’d fallen face up instead of down, or he could have drowned in the mud puddle. Or unluckily! Wishing Pa dead flooded me with pleasure. And then guilt.
The cuckoos were still at it, so we left Pa and carefully made our way out to Jed’s castle. The nonstop cuckoo riot made me feel so crazy, I itched to run ahead and stop the clocks. For once I kind of understood the feeling Pa must have had when he used to go to such lengths shutting them up. But I held myself back to let Grum lean on me. Even though it wasn’t far, it took a long time for Grum to find firm ground to put her weight on. Between steps I wiggled my toes in the nubby mud.
When Ma opened the door, a mixture of smells wafted out. Candles, sour beer, and something sweet that I had been smelling a lot of lately—the Perfume-Lady smell in the cookie dough and the secret tunnel. Barbie glanced nervously at me, and I knew she recognized it too.
Back when he moved to the castle, Jed had run an extension cord from the house for electricity. Pa had yanked that out of the outlet with some flaming words after Jed ran away, so now our only light was a flashlight fading fast. Grum lowered herself onto the bed to rest under the crazy cuckoos as Ma shone the narrowing beam around to find some candles and matches.
There they were, on a milk crate beside Jed’s bed, along with a bunch of empty beer cans. Pa must have been here earlier tonight drowning his sorrows with the cuckoos!
The candles soon filled the little room with flickering light, and we saw the birds all popping out and singing. Grum reached up carefully to remove a clock from the Sheetrock wall.
I remembered when we’d put up those walls, Jed and me and Pa, the day after Jed got the idea to move out there with Grum’s clocks. Until then, the play castle had just had bare stone walls. The clocks needed a flat surface to hang on, and a new layer of insulation in between would keep the room warm in winter.
Pa whistled and told growing-up-in-the-gore stories as he showed me and Jed how to spread the Sheetrock mud over the seams and sand it down smooth. That day was the last time I remembered seeing those two in the same room for more than ten minutes without getting at each other’s throats.
Now picturing Pa all pathetic in the mud with Jed’s cat made me feel bad for him. He blamed himself for Jed running away. We all blamed Pa. But maybe we were all wrong. That note Jed had left in the caves made me wonder. I wished I could figure out the truth. But first, quiet the birds.
When Grum took down the first clock, its cuckoo stopped singing, but the others kept at it. Grum inspected the clock front and back, then put it back on the wall. The cuckoo started popping in and out again.
Barbie took another clock down. The cuckoo stopped. She put the clock back and the bird resumed its cuckoo business.
I gave it a try—same thing. On off, on off, on off. It was pretty cool. I wasn’t minding the noise so much now.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, enough of that!” Ma started taking the clocks down and piling them on the bed. We all helped. The room gradually grew quiet. Outside the cat meowed.
Grum wagged her head like a pendulum itself. “I don’t understand,” she said. “This cuckoo madness isn’t even possible.”
“It has to be possible,” I said. “It’s happening.”
“Maybe Pa did something to jam the clocks?” suggested Barbie. “Like he used to when he was a kid.”
“Except in reverse,” I said.
Grum continued shaking her head. “Even Craig couldn’t cause this chaos. Pendulums work because of gravity. They follow predictable rules. The clocks should sound the hour, and that’s it—and then only if the weights on the chains have been reset. None of these clocks have been wound up!”
“Okay, that’s eerie,” Ma said. “But they’re quiet now. What do you say we go back to bed and figure this out tomorrow?”
Grum nodded. “It’s been a long day.”
She didn’t know the half of it.
On our way past Pa, Barbie said, “Shouldn’t we bring him inside?”
Ma looked at him with an expression alternating between pity and anger, but leaning toward pity. Stepping toward him she said, “Sebby, he’s heavy. You’ll have to help me.” Man, he looked ridiculous lying there with his arms flopped out to the sides like a cheerleader.
“No!” Grum said sharply. “You told Craig what needed to be said, Claire, and now what he needs from you is tough love. Leave him be. He’s made his own bed, let him lie in it.”
“A water bed,” I almost said, but Grum wouldn’t have appreciated me joking when she was being serious.
At that the rest of us went to lie in our soft, comfortable beds.
The next morning I woke up before Barney. My back was killing me. Plus I needed to use the bathroom. And since I had to go downstairs anyway, I figured I’d put on what was left of my sneakers and drop by Zensylvania to corner Jed. During the cuckoo snafu I’d forgotten that plan, but now it was the first thing on my mind. After a bowl of Cheerios.
I was tipping the bowl to drink the thick sugar milk out of it when I noticed the trail of dried mud across the linoleum. The mud tracked into the living room and stopped at the top of a head. Pa’s.
Someone had dragged him in after all, his feet pointing toward the couch. He lay sprawled face-up in the same posture we’d seen him in last night, right down to the cheerleader arms. Except for the slight motion of his chest as he breathed, he looked stone still. He wasn’t even snoring. From the looks of it, he still hadn’t woken up from when he passed out, and I didn’t want to be the first person he saw when he opened his bloodshot eyes. I took off.
The drag marks came up the steps. Pa’s heavy body had left a deep trench in the mud. Foot trails had dried in front of the stairs, continuing out behind the house from when we’d gone to check the cuckoos. The footprints had hardened like you see sometimes in concrete sidewalks. Like fossils! Grum’s shoe fossils wobbled at the edges, showing how careful she was to find a firm grip. Barbie and I had both been barefoot. Barbie’s big toes stuck out of the prints like fat heads. I filed it away for teasing later.
Who had brought Pa inside? I tried walking in the half-erased tracks under the drag marks to identify them. They couldn’t be mine—I’d been sleeping. They couldn’t be Grum’s because Grum couldn’t drag Pa into the house without winding up in an ambulance. The prints looked longer than Ma’s feet, more like Pa’s. But Pa couldn’t have dragged himself. It must have been Barbie, even though I didn’t see any fathead toes. She was the one who’d suggested bringing him inside in the first place. Her feet were the one part of her that I hadn’t outgrown this week. Oh, and her fingernails.
Now that it was daylight and I had followed the foot fossils most of the way there already, I thought I’d look inside Jed’s castle. Maybe I’d find some kind of clue there that we’d missed the first million times we searched. After he didn’t come home, Ma had checked all of Jed’s pockets while me and Barbie rifled through his books and papers hunting for names, phone numbers, anything that might give us a lead. We contacted all his friends from school, all his old girlfriends, even a bunch of people he knew from marches, protests, rallies, and such. Nobody had seen or heard a trace of him.
Upon opening the door, the sweet smell inside the castle hit me again, but I was hit harder by the sight of the empty wall where the cuckoos had hung. It used to be just plain, grayish-white Sheetrock with white stripes of joint compound because Jed didn’t want to take the time to paint before moving in. Well, not anymore. Now it had an intricate design, all beautiful swoops and swirls of pastel colors, just faint enough that we wouldn’t have noticed it last night in the candlelight. The pattern looked a little like the baby blankets Grum crocheted. No, more like seashells all tossed together, or a bunch of old jewelry spread out on a satin sheet. Then I realized exactly what it reminded me of: the art in Boots Odum’s house. His paintings.
Had he come out here and painted Jed’s wall? No, of course not.
Had Jed come back and done it? If so, it had to be after Thursday morning when Stupid showed up inside the henhouse. I’d have noticed the change when I checked the castle then. Was the paint still wet? I ran my finger along the sea-shell curves, and that’s when I realized something that made the hair stand up on the back of my neck.
There wasn’t any paint on the drywall. The color came from
underneath
the layer of unpainted paper. It had an almost shimmering lifelike quality to it. And as I ran my finger over it, the color began to move. I didn’t need any magic glasses to see it.
I yelped. Because now I knew exactly what it was. That
stuff.
Whatever it was in the rocks that made the amazing colors. It had somehow leached into the wall. And somehow set the cuckoos off. And who knew what else it could somehow do? Straighten Miss Beverly’s neck . . . and turn her prized poodle into a statue.
Was that
stuff
what Jed had tried to warn me and Barbie about? Only one way to know, and that was to find him. Which I’d planned to do in the first place, before I got distracted. If only my brain could be more like Barbie’s sock drawer.
I went running out of the castle straight to my bike and was rounding the corner of the house when I had to slam on the brakes. Or else run over Barbie. Whoops, we had a plan to take all those poor petrified chickens with their pathetic eyes to the cavern and return them to their feathers before breakfast.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Barbie asked. A common question around me.
“Oh, just goofing around on my bike while waiting for Barbie Big Toes to get out of bed.” To prove it I hopped my bike along one of the grooves in the hardened mud.
Barbie shook her head at me. “I’m
sooooo
glad we’re not identical. Anyway, Mr. No, why did you go and drag Pa inside last night after what Grum said?”

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